In 2010, Colorado State Senator Michael Johnston took credit for a piece of legislation called Senate Bill 191, which he said would produce “Great Schools, Great Teachers, Great Principals.” Its main feature was tying teacher evaluation to their students’ scores, which counted for 50%. But it included other time bombs. One allowed districts to lay off teachers for various reasons. Now seven teachers and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association is suing.
One of those who lost her job was Cynthia Masters, a special-education teacher in a K-8 school. She was one of only 3,000 to lose their job.
“In the four years since the law was passed, nearly 3,000 DPS teachers have lost their positions due to what the district calls “reduction in building,” or RIB for short. The reasons that teachers are RIBed vary: Some lose their jobs because their schools are “turned around” or closed. Others are cut because school enrollment drops. In Masters’s case, she was RIBed due to a decrease in the number of special-ed students.
Of those 3,000 teachers, 1,240 had at least three years’ worth of positive evaluations, including Masters. And not all of them have been able to find new jobs. According to the law, still widely referred to as Senate Bill 191, RIBed teachers with three years of positive reviews — officially known as “nonprobationary” — who can’t find a position within a certain time frame are put on unpaid leave, a move that both unions believe violates the state constitution……”
“Brad Bartels, an attorney with the Colorado Education Association, says these teachers are victims of DPS’s brand of musical chairs. They didn’t lose their positions because they were bad teachers, he insists: “They just didn’t have a chair when the music stopped.”
“Seven DPS teachers and the DCTA have now sued the district. (The statewide CEA is representing the DCTA in the matter.) The lawsuit is a class action, and the plaintiffs represent several different classes, including all teachers in Colorado who were considered nonprobationary prior to the passage of Senate Bill 191 and all nonprobationary DPS teachers who were RIBed and ended up on unpaid leave.
“Westword spoke with five of the seven plaintiffs and found that they have several things in common: All are older than 45 and have good teaching records. Upon losing their positions, all five applied for hundreds of teaching assignments within DPS but, inexplicably to them, received just a few interviews. Only one managed to avoid being put on unpaid leave or being forced into early retirement.
“I applied for over 700 positions in the district,” says plaintiff Michelle Montoya, who got RIBed in the fall of 2010. “I thought, ‘I can deal with this. I’m going to go get a job. My skills are definitely needed.’ And I just never got a second interview.”
Will Senator Michael Johnston live long enough to declare that Colorado now has great teachers, great principals, great schools, thanks to Senate Bill 191?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SB 191 should have been written in Charmin.
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The reasons for NOT going into teaching keeps growing. The politicians it would seem either have NO idea of what they are doing or else, cynically, do. They are either abysmally ignorant – seemingly for sure – or else they just do not see the value of good teaching and/or have NO idea of what it takes to be a good teacher. Where it will end, only God knows.
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I believe that Denver Teachers have a pay-for-performance plan kick-started in 1999 with funds from two area foundations and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in California. The initial four-year project, designed and managed by a Boston-based consulting firm CTAC—the Community Training and Assistance Center–co-opted the teachers into a program of industrial-strength management-by-objectives, rebranded as evaluations based on achieving “student learning objectives,” or “student growth objectives” with a bonus plan for meeting or exceeding these objectives.
Over time, teachers learned how to get a bonus. It could be that veterans of this system–teachers who are likely to be to be earning “excellent ratings” and extra pay–are being targeted for dismissal.
Add a little age discrimination that allows for churning the “workforce” by about a third–approximating a policy recommendation for a 25% churn that I tripped on from a Brookings report offered up by a team dominated by economists. The only difference is the economists wanted a single district-wide VAM score to be set with a cutoff that would fire the lowest performing teachers.
See: Croft, M., Glazerman, S., Goldhaber, D., Loeb, S., Raudenbush, S.,Staiger, D., & Whitehurst, G.R. (2011). Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/04/26-evaluating-teachers
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“”Forced placement is a civil-rights travesty,” Boasberg says. “It’s particularly inequitable because our kids in poverty, who most need the best teachers, have instead had force-placed upon them teachers whom their school does not want to have. And that is fundamentally wrong.”
Yes, this is very bad for students, especially kids in poverty. I also wonder if this is happening in part because the majority of teachers are women … a civil-rights travesty, indeed!
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The majority of those teachers is also older, darker, higher paid, and more experienced (and less likely to put up with stupid b.s.).
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Sounds like age discrimination should be added to the suit.
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No doubt they were replaced with young inexperience, inexpensive teachers that they can push around like TFA
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Forgive me for sounding dramatic, but let’s face it. The “Education Reformers” aren’t going to stop. We have the information. It is getting worse. The teachers, students, and parents in economically challenged urban areas are under attack. Many of my colleagues (teachers who still have jobs) are afraid to read this blog! I was laid off, too. I saw Diane speak when she came to Philadelphia. She said (paraphrase) “Education Reform is the Civil Rights issue of our time.” I was the first to spring out of my chair to lead the audience in a standing ovation.
I don’t have all the answers. Together, we can bring about change.
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Poor idea. If they close a fire station, police station, or a military base, does everyone have to re-apply for their job? No, they get transferred. These people are employed by an organization, not a plot of land.
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No matter what progress the resistance is making in slowing up or stopping the corporate take over of public education, the Axis of Evil—for instance, Obama, Duncan, Gates—will keep marching forward as if nothing is happening to slow them up or defeat them.
Obama’s popularity keeps dropping in the polls, but none of the media reports even hint that this could be, in part, caused by what Obama and his masters are doing to the public schools, children and parents.
There will be no compromise with the Axis of Evil, and I suspect that only a Pyrrhic victory will stop them—this means many children, parents and teachers will have to suffer frustration, job loss and lots of stress.
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Isn’t that already happening (job loss, stress)? Look, I’m no “born leader” but I know enough about history that ‘bad things happen when good people do nothing.”
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Persistence and action will win the day if there are enough people involved. As long as the US stays a democracy and votes count, a few billionaires can be defeated by those who are actively involved in teaching others about what is going on.
The pen is mightier than the sword and what the dollar can buy.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Help me with this, what am I not getting?(quoting from the linked nwsppr article): “If you have a school that has thirty teachers who each make $80,000, their budget gets charged exactly the same as a school with thirty teachers who make $40,000 a year,” Boasberg says. “Schools have absolutely no positive or negative financial impact for hiring high-salaried or low-salaried teachers.”
Doesn’t Boasberg’s hypothetical illustrate exactly why admin would rather– using an example from the article– trial an experienced, award-winning [older & higher-pd, duh] nonprobationary Ribbed teacher for one semester, use her to train the newbie fresh out of college, then release her back into the limbo of unpaid leave?
Col Sen bill 191 itself, & the way in which DPS is choosing to implement it illustrate why teachers unions exist & are needed.
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If the district is paying the salaries, the schools don’t see any savings by hiring less-expensive teachers, the district does. Traditionally, schools have had a budget for supplies, etc. but teachers’ salaries have been paid by the district.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I get it now. So if there’s some sub-rosa ‘asterisk’ placed next to the names of highly-paid tenured RIBbed teachers, it’s done at the district level.
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…and did the district fire them, then hire TFA scabs to fill the void? THAT is what I’d like to know.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx There are a bunch of figures on p.5 of the article, but they aren’t lined up in a way one can draw easy conclusions (i.e. figs for RIB’d teachers in each of several yrs, but hiring figs only for the most recent yr). In the most recent yr, of 897 new hires, 44% under 30y.o., 10% from ‘programs such as TFA’. Of all non-probationary [3yrs good ratings] RIB’d in the 3 yrs since 191 passed, 46% were 50+ y.o. The individual teachers rep’d in the suit seem exemplary, but the ‘non-probationary’ category is undercut by the fact that up until 191, ratings were simply ‘sat’-‘unsat’.
The suit wisely zeroes in on the fact that Bill 191 can be (& in DPS is being) used as an end-run around due process.
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I live in the FNE District of Denver, everyone of our schools are failing and the charter Schools scores are even worse. O worked for DPS and was forced out in 2010. Messages to your mayor, governor, and various legislators letting them know that your vote will be counted in November and they need to take head of your message. You complain, but not to the right people.
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